I pretty much agree with Jonathan here.
Two other elements: the avant-garde of the 1920s, and even more so I
think the American movement beginning with Harry Smith and Maya Deren,
operated simultaneously in opposition to the naive representationalism
of the dominant commercial cinema and
Would that I could resist this, but no…
It’s probably a little dangerous to think of these films as “experimental” in
any strong sense of that term, since mostly the “experiments” on view in these
films are about cultivating film’s ability to tell stories; or else, formal
experimentation was
